For the last few months, EcoCultureLab has been planning EarthDay+50, a week-long teach-in/festival running concurrently with, and in support of, other Earth Week events including the 3-day national climate strike organized and supported by over 300 organizations.
The intent of EarthDay+50 is to mark and reflect on the past 50 years of activism since the first Earth Day Teach-In, which got 20 million Americans (and others) out into the streets, parks, and public spaces to register their desire to change the (socio-)environmental course of our society. EarthDay+50 is an opportunity for Burlingtonians, Vermonters, and others to assess what has been accomplished, what has not, and what the future calls for, and to mark, celebrate, and accelerate the path forward.
Or at least that was the plan.
At this point, with the increasing spread of COVID-19 across the nation and world, the University of Vermont and a growing number of other colleges and universities have announced a shift to remote teaching and learning for an indefinite period. That means that faculty are busy right now developing remote teaching options for the rest of the semester, that late April may feature a scramble to complete course requirements, that students may or may not be on campus during Earth Week, and that on-campus events during Earth Week may have to be canceled altogether. UVM has announced that “in-person events and gatherings will be limited to those with 25 attendees or fewer,” though it’s not clear how long this will be for.
Which raises the question: How will Earth Week plans be affected?
The 50th anniversary of Earth Day is still a momentous occasion, worthy of being marked out for reflection and learning. But events requiring live, physical participation may, at the very least, have to be replaced with “virtual” events. And EarthDay+50, instead of being a high-profile event spread out over a week, could fizzle out altogether. Or, alternatively, it could become an event spread out over the kind of time that would make any self-respecting virus proud: let’s say, perhaps, a year. More on that momentarily.
After all, the Earth, 50 years after Earth Day, is certainly feeling feverish, warmed not only by global climate instability with its attendant risks — intensified fires, storms, and now pandemics — but also by the political and cultural instabilities marking humanity’s response to this interconnected array of strange visitors.
On our EarthDay+50 Schedule page, you can find a list of some of the actions we have been involved in or are aware of, which we were hoping to promote as part of the events of Earth Week. (This list does not include events aimed exclusively at UVM students, which are to have been announced on the Student Life Earth Week web site and to have been widely promoted around campus. It does include Earth Week events that are open to the public.) We have added notes there (in italics) indicating what has changed, if anything, due to the COVID-19 responses.
At this point, we can fully assume that confirmation of any of these events will not likely come until the “wave” of COVID-19 has washed over us, and that no one knows how soon that will be or what things will look like afterward. (For some worrying projections, see here. And for a short meditation on the pandemic as a wave, or an eclipse, or something else, see here.)
The suggestion I would like to make is that EarthDay+50 — and other Earth Week events planned for this year — shift from being a week-long teach-in reflecting on 50 years of environmental action (or whatever else Earth Week events are) to being a year-long teach-in on the global community’s preparedness for pandemics, superstorms, and other large-scale disruptions that we know are likely to occur in the coming fifty years. And that by Earth Day 2021, we stop to assess what we’ve learned and accomplished.
It’s too early to say that EarthDay+50 has been derailed by the appearance of this new global actor, COVID-19, but we are certainly needing to rethink things.
That said, COVID-19 is not exactly a new global actor — viruses and pandemics do come around every so often — so much as it is a variation on a very old global actor, the planetary microbiome that generates the companion species — “organisms at the edge of life” — known as viruses.
As our hoped-for Earth Week artist, Marina Zurkow, puts it in her (spookily prescient) audio meditation “Hello Virus” (created with her Dear Climate collaborators):
“Hello, virus. Welcome to our home.”
Comments welcome!